Chapter 7
Julia Claire had been a nervous wreck ever since she, the mayor, the reverend, and the pious Widow Kotzwinkle had returned to town just ahead of the storm, which had now passed. Julia had gone to bed in her suite of rooms on the third floor of her multifaceted establishment—the Lone Star Outpost—at her usual time, which was midnight. After most of her customers, save a few die-hard gamblers, had left for the night.
Since Marshal Abel Wilkes had been so mercilessly killed, leaving the town essentially lawless, she’d been closing off her third-floor brothel area after eleven. The jakes, or paying customers, had grown more and more brazen in the days since, so out of concern for the safety of her girls, Julia closed the brothel down before midnight, ushered the customers out, and sent the girls to bed for the night—to sleep.
She herself had gone to bed at midnight, but slumber had eluded her. So she’d crawled out of bed, donned her thick pink wrap against the penetrating chill after the storm, and gone down to her office, which was located off the storage area at the back, in the original part of the rustic, rambling log building, which she’d purchased from the old hide hunter Beaver Thorn.
Now she sat nursing a snifter of Spanish brandy and tapping a small card against the blotter on her large oak desk lit by a green-shaded lamp. Most of the office was in shadow, adding to Julia’s unease. She hadn’t been afraid of monsters in years, but she suddenly felt as though monsters lurked in the shadows behind the large, well-appointed office’s heavy brocade and leather furniture, which was arranged around the large stone fireplace in the wall to her right.
She could fairly see the yellow of the creatures’ occasionally blinking, menacing eyes!
The card.
She held it between the thumb and index finger of her left hand, tapping it against the blotter. She held it so that the writing on it—scripted in a large, flatly looping, decidedly male, educated hand—faced her.
It read: I know your secret.
The small ivory envelope lay beside it, her name written in the same hand as the note. She’d found the envelope under her office door after she’d returned from her and her fellow townsfolk’s desperate but futile visit to the shack of the washed-up lawman, Catfish Charlie Tuttle. Poor Catfish—he’d deteriorated just awfully since he’d drawered his badge...
I know your secret.
Anxiousness throbbed in Julia.
Who’d left the card, and what did it mean?
Well, there is really only one thing it could mean, isn’t there?
She’d been dreading this for years.
Her mind raced. The harder she tried to keep the thoughts . . . the old fears . . . from coming, the faster they came.
Was all she had built here—one of the finest establishments in West Texas—about to be taken away from her? Was the life she’d made for herself, a life she herself had dictated the terms of, not some man, about to turn to ashes?
Again, she tapped the note on the blotter.
She jerked with a start when something scraped across the window behind her. Frowning, puzzled, she turned and studied the curtained window.
Silence.
Probably just a branch of the shrub back there scratching across the glass.
She turned back to face her desk and the note lying face-up on top of it, the heavy, inked letters boldly accusing, taunting . . . threatening.
Again, something scraped across the window behind her.
She gasped, jerking again with a start, and hipped around in the chair to study the curtained window. The scrape had sounded louder that time. Her heart fluttered as she studied the green velvet drapes.
The scrape had increased her anxiousness.
Trying to suppress her fear of what she might see out there, she rose from the chair, slowly raised her hands, and used the back of each to slide the curtains roughly a foot apart. The window faced the alley running behind the Lone Star Outpost. It was too dark in the alley to see much of anything except the lumpy, dark shapes of some cedar and cottonwood trees, a few storage sheds, and one old, unused stock pen facing the Lone Star on the alley’s opposite side.
She pressed her face up close to the glass, blocking the reflection of the lamp behind her. As far as she could tell, there was no one back there. On the other hand, the shaggy shrub abutting the back wall, its branches rising a few inches above the bottom of the window, was not moving. There seemed to be little or no breeze after the rain.
What, if not one of the branches, had scraped the window?
She studied the branches of the scrub cedar. Suddenly a couple of them moved down low on her right. She gasped and stepped back, almost falling into the chair flanking her. Then a shadow bounded out away from the shrubs—in the dim starlight, a small, cat-shaped shadow, with tail raised, bounded across the alley and into the darkness between the stock pen and a tumbledown shed.
Julia chuckled, then let the curtains fall back into place.
“A cat, Julia,” she said to herself with dry self-mockery. “Only a cat.” She sat back down in the chair. “Don’t let your nerves—”
Again, something scraped against the glass, louder than both previous times. It was followed by a soft crunching sound—maybe the stealthy tread of a foot?
Anger rising inside her, she rose again from the chair and slid the curtains apart once more. “All right—who’s out there?” she said to the dark alley beyond the window.
Still, she could see nothing. No movement whatever.
Anger and fear made her heart flutter.
“Only one way to get to the bottom of this!” she said tightly, turning and opening the top right-hand drawer of her desk.
She pulled out a leather-covered box a little smaller than a shoebox. She tripped the hasp and opened the lid, revealing a .38-caliber pocket pistol resting on a molded bed of red velvet—a pretty, snub-nosed, silver-chased revolver with pearl grips that glinted in the light of the oil lamp.
She clicked open the loading gate, pulled back the hammer, and turned the cylinder, making sure that all six chambers showed brass. Then she eased the hammer back into its cradle, clicked the loading gate home, and, holding the revolver barrel up beside her right shoulder, walked out from around the desk and across the carpeted office to the door.
She opened the door and stepped out into the storage room. The dark shapes of crates, barrels, filled gunnysacks, and large sausages, which were hanging from the rafters, were revealed in the light from the lamp behind her. Leaving her office door open, she stepped out into the large, mostly dark room, swung right, and made her way through the clutter to the heavy back door.
The locking bar rested in its steel cradle across it.
She removed it with a grunt, leaned it against the wall on her left, then placed her hand on the steel handle. She paused, drawing a couple of deep breaths, steeling herself against her fear.
She should call Howard Richter, the bouncer on duty in the gambling parlor, but she would handle this herself. What if whoever was trying to scare her was the same man or men who’d left the note under her door? No one else could know.
She was alone in this.
And if whoever was out in the alley was the same man who’d penned the note, she might as well know sooner rather than later. The possibility that she could shoot him or them fluttered across her anxious brain. If the law became involved, though there was no longer any law in Wolfwater—which worked both for and against her—she could say whoever was in the alley was trying to accost her or to break into the storage room. With the storage room so close to her office and her safe, in which she stored large quantities of cash between runs to the bank, she either needed to post a guard back here or get a more substantial door.
Tucking her bottom lip under her upper teeth, Julia drew the door slowly open, wincing against the groan of the two large steel hinges.
She took one step into the alley and slid her gaze slowly from her left to her right. “Who’s out here?” she said, keeping her voice low.
It still sounded loud in the alley’s dark, eerie silence, which was broken only by the distant yipping of a coyote somewhere out in the rocky desert. She took another step into the alley, turned right, and walked toward the window beneath which the murky black shapes of the shrubs sat. As she did, she clicked the pocket pistol’s hammer back to full cock and aimed it out straight ahead of her.
“Who’s here?” she said, hearing both anger and anxiety in her voice. “I know you’re out here. Who are you and what do you want?”
Her slippered feet crunched in the sand and gravel.
The shrubs slipped up on her right now. She stopped at the near edge of the window and peered behind the shrubs.
Nothing. Just prickly desert branches.
She turned to carefully study the alley around her.
Still seeing nothing, she walked on, past the shrubs to the building’s rear corner. Ten feet beyond lay a mercantile, the window in the wall facing Julia dark at this hour. She peered up the alley between the mercantile and the Lone Star Outpost toward the main street, a hundred feet away.
Nothing there, either.
No human shapes. Nothing moving.
Hmm.
Julia frowned as she again looked around her.
Could her anxiousness about the note have made her imagine the scraping against the window? Or at least have blown it out of proportion?
Again, she looked around.
Nothing.
That must be it. Just her imagination. Her nerves.
Gently setting the pistol’s hammer back into its cradle, she lowered the gun, turned, and retraced her steps back to the storage room’s back door, which she’d left open in her haste and nervousness. She stepped back into the cluttered room, the light showing through her open office door.
She’d just turned to shut the door when a floorboard squawked and someone grabbed her from behind. A thick, smelly hand closed over her mouth, muffling her scream. More footsteps sounded and then another hand ripped the .38 out of her grip. As the man who’d grabbed her from behind lifted her up off the ground, keeping his hand clamped tight over her mouth, he said, “Get that bag over her head fast!”
Someone stepped up from her right, and in a blur of murky, dark motion, a bag was thrust down over her head just as the man behind her removed his hand from her mouth.
“No!” she yelled inside the smelly, dark bag. She tried to yell again, but then a gag closed tightly around the bag and over her mouth. It was jerked back taut behind her head, and as she struggled in vain against the big man holding her from behind, the gag was quickly knotted painfully tight against the back of her neck.
Then, moaning against the gag, she was brusquely thrown to the floor. A man’s heavy knee was thrust down against her back, and both her arms were pulled back behind her.
“No good strugglin’, dearie,” a deep, breathless voice said into her right ear as her hands were tied behind her back. “You’re not goin’ anywhere, an’ no one’s comin’ to save you!”
She heard the clomping of hooves and the rattle of wheels in the alley.
Terror a racing stallion inside her, Julia groaned against the gag and struggled against the ropes—in vain. She was picked up like a sack of grain, carried into the alley—she could feel the change in the air around her—and then hurled as equally unceremoniously into the back of the wagon with a loud thump.
Her meeting with the splintery floor of the wagon dazed her, taking some of the fight out of her.
Two more thumps as her assailants leaped into the wagon on either side of her.
“Get goin’, Gannon!” said the man on her left, his voice furtively low. “We ain’t got all night!”
Then hooves clomped, a horse whickered, the wagon lurched forward, and Julia was carted off to only God knew where!